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The Shout

The Shout

Poem introduction

At the junior school I went to we had a very excitable science teacher and no equipment which was a bit of a bewildering combination. And he used to give us these little missions - they weren't experiments they were more like missions. And one day he asked me and another kid to go outside and not come back into the school until we'd measured the size of the human voice without any equipment. So we devised this little experiment - we decided that we would keep moving further and further apart and shouting at each other until we couldn't hear each other any longer and that would be the size of the human voice. Unfortunately the village we lived in wasn't that big and there came this point when this other kid just fell off the edge into Lancashire or some dark place and it's at that moment when the science breaks down that I try and get poetry to rush in and fill the gap.